Campuses look to emergency systems

FARGO (AP) - Officials at the state's two largest universities say it would be difficult to prevent a shooting rampage, but the schools are looking at more ways to inform students about emergencies.

"I don't think any security program could stop what happened at Virginia Tech," Duane Czapiewski, University of North Dakota police chief, said Wednesday. "When that person decided to do what he did, it's relatively close to impossible to stop him."

Czapiewski said university officials have been meeting this week to review the massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 33 students and teachers, and talk about emergency notification systems.

"If there's a simple solution, it's going to be wrong," he said. "It takes a number of endeavors to address something of the magnitude that happened at Virginia Tech."

North Dakota State University spokesman David Wahlberg said the shootings on Monday and a bomb scare at NDSU's campus on Tuesday have prompted a number of conversations about handling emergencies.

"One of the biggest challenges for a university is that we have a very diverse group," Wahlberg said. "We have 12,000 students so we have 12,000 schedules. We have people scattered across 40 city blocks in 100 buildings."

Wahlberg said the current emergency communication plan includes telephone trees, e-mail alerts, Web page notices and media notices. "But we know that not everyone is at an online computer or listening to the same radio station at the same time," he said.

"We'll look at technologies, policies and procedures, which can sometimes be inadvertent barriers to quick communications," Wahlberg said.

Czapiewski said improving safety for students is an ongoing process, one that will be easier to assess after the shock wears off from the Virginia Tech shootings.

"To say right now that somebody did something wrong is an unfortunate thing," Czapiewski said. "This is not a time to make rash decisions."